Was it in that period that his legend began?
I don’t know because I didn’t know him then. Well, I knew him, but I was young and I couldn’t take things in and grasp their significance. I got to know him well from the beginning of the seventies, by which time he’d become a legend. I got to know him as the man who plants his children in Galilee and fights to liberate them.
All the same, I ask myself as I stand here beneath the rain of images covering the bedroom walls, did the legend begin when the story ended? Did he start telling people about Nahilah at the very moment he stopped visiting her?
I don’t know.
He said he continued his visits over there until 1978, when in March the Israelis occupied part of southern Lebanon in which they established a dependent ministate to which they gave the name of the State of Free Lebanon. It was just a narrow strip of Lebanese territory that formed a buffer zone between the fedayeen and the settlements of Galilee, which had been exposed to bombardment by Katyusha rockets.
He said the occupation made it impossible to slip across the border, and he began contacting Nahilah and his children by telephone. He spoke to me often of his journeys, and of the three little Nahilahs that were born in Deir al-Asad: Nahilah, the daughter of Noor; Nahilah, the daughter of Salem; and Nahilah, the daughter of Saleh.
He said he would phone all his Nahilahs, that he received their photos by way of a friend in Cyprus and that he lived with them without seeing them; he lived with the photos. “The phone doesn’t let you do it, Son. What can you say on the phone? On the phone you can only speak in generalities and clichés. Phone talk isn’t talk.”
UMM HASSAN suggested I send you back over there, and then she died and left me alone with you.
Come to think of it, what do you suggest, Father? There’s me, you, and this huge number of pictures hung on the walls of your house. The pictures, I swear, have put a spell on me. They’re amazing: smiling girls, boys holding themselves stiffly in front of the camera, and a woman looking into the distance, as if she were gazing at you — waiting for you.
Your life is coming to an end with photos. And what about me? What shall I do with them after you die? I mean, God forbid, I don’t want you to die, but if God decides to reclaim what’s His — after a long life — what do you want me to do with the photos? Should I return them to your children? Should I bury them with you? Or should I leave them as they are for whoever comes to live in your house to throw out with the trash?
I don’t know.
But I won’t be sending you back over there. Even supposing I wanted to send you back, I wouldn’t know how, and I don’t know if the Israelis would allow it.
And besides, why all the fuss?
Why don’t your children ask about you? Did Amna tell them you’re dead, and did they already have a funeral for you over there, and was that the end of the matter? Or have they forgotten about you, has the image of the man who knelt and kissed them one by one been wiped from their memories? Or was everything cut off after Nahilah died?
You didn’t tell me about the eighth Nahilah.
The eighth Nahilah is the woman, Father, and I’m prepared to make changes to the numbering because I know you love magic numbers. So, let’s throw out Nahilah number six according to our previous classification and call the Nahilah of the Roman olive tree Nahilah number six, and that makes the Nahilah of the flower basket the seventh Nahilah, the last.
You didn’t tell me about that Nahilah. You only said that Salem told you all she was interested in was flowers.
“Her senility’s expressing itself through flowers,” said the son to the father he didn’t know.
“What’s all this about flowers?” the man asked his wife from his hotel in Prague, where he was visiting the city with an official Palestinian delegation.
“There’s nothing to it. I like flowers and your son makes fun of me and says I’m senile.”
After having left his job in Haifa, your son opened his own garage in the village. Business was good, and soon his two brothers, Mirwan and Saleh, went to work with him. Ahmad graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a master’s degree in Arabic literature and is now preparing his doctoral thesis on the work of Ghassan Kanafani. Nezar is working with Noor’s husband as a contractor. Noor is well, except her husband suffers from kidney stones, but the doctor says that his life is not in danger. Salma, the pretty one, is working as a teacher in al-Ramah and none of her flock of suitors has yet found grace in her lovely green eyes.
Why didn’t you tell me about the Nahilah that you haven’t seen again?
About the woman with the blazing head of white hair who had taken to carrying around a small basket into which she put flowers and little folded scraps of paper on which she wrote the names of those she loved. She’d mix up the flowers with the scraps of paper, warning her grandchildren that she’d put a black mark next to the name of anyone who annoyed her.
That was the game she played with her grandchildren. They’d visit her and she’d spill the contents of her basket onto the ground and ask them to play the basket game with her, and they’d open the scraps of paper and read out their own names and the names of their mothers and fathers, as well as your name, all of your names.
Nahilah believed the basket was her family, and when they brought her back from the hospital to the house, and she was in the throes of the disease, she gave the basket to Nahilah, Noor’s daughter, and asked her to leave only three Nahilahs in the basket, because Old Nahilah was going to die. She asked Noor to change the flowers once a week, and each time, she was to change the little scraps of paper with the names written on them.
“Keep the names safe, Daughter, and don’t you dare stop writing them and putting them in the basket. This basket keeps the names safe from death.”
She took the scrap of paper with her name on it out of the basket and tore it up, and the next day she died.
Don’t tell me now about Nahilah’s death; I’m not here to listen to sad tales. I’m here to tell you I won’t send you back over there. I’ll bury you in the camp, in the mosque that’s been turned into a cemetery where the young men are buried. Your story will come to an end there, Father. I won’t tell little Nahilah that she has to tear up your names and take them out of the basket. I don’t believe that little Nahilah has kept up the tradition, for we forget our promises to our dead; we keep them for a few days, and then we forget. I’m sure little Nahilah has forgotten the basket she inherited from her grandmother among her toys, that the basket of flowers ended up like my grandmother’s pillow, and that mold will find the scraps of paper on which the woman wrote the names of the ones she loved.
Your Nahilah was careful to rewrite the names when she changed the flowers in the basket. She’d toss the old flowers under the Roman olive tree, burn the names, and replace them with fresh flowers and rewrite the names on new little scraps of paper.
Where are the women?
Where are the two women who used to come?
Where are the friends and comrades?
Where is everyone?
No one.
You are dying now, and there is this no one around you. You are dying in calm and in silence. I make you up as I please and I make myself up in you, I see what you have seen and what I haven’t seen myself, I speak of a country I’ve never visited — a country I entered a few times at night with the fedayeen but never really could see. You told me it was like the Lebanese south, flat and overlooked by low hills, and that it was the epitome of a warm and tender land, which is why it had been ideal for Christ. You can’t imagine Jesus Christ without Galilee. This land resembles him and is fitting only for strangers, which is why they call it Galilee of the Nations. The Jews fled to Galilee after the ruin of their kingdom, and we remained in it after the ruin of our history.